A week or so ago, I posed the following question:
When you hear someone say that they are “spiritual”, what does that convey to you? And if you have ever said something like, “I’m not religious but I’m spiritual,” what did you mean by it?
Of the five comments I received, none were from people who would currently describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious. I’m not sure what that means. Possibly, no such people read my blog. Possibly they do, but, not being religious, felt no need to respond. Perhaps they were afraid of being held up to ridicule, which a reasonable concern, I suppose, but far from my intent.
One commenter, now a Catholic, says she used to describe herself as spiritual but not religious. I was glad to see this, because it’s the only comment that gives an inward view. She says:
It meant that I believed in things other than this material world, including deities, non-human spirits, and souls of dead humans. I also believed that I had a great inner, spiritual power.
But I was never beholden to anything or anybody, including deities. I had no special love or devotion to any of them. That would have been “religion,†and I just saw as an unnecessary restriction. I just wanted to do my own thing.
Now, the second half of this matches the outward view of the other commenters. I’m more interested in the first half. What Heather meant by “spiritual” was, effectively, the following two things:
- She believed in a supernatural reality.
- She believed she had a “great inner, spiritual power.”
I don’t know what power Heather had in mind; but according to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas she was right on both counts. There is a supernatural reality beyond this material world we see, and we do each have a great inner, spiritual power. In fact, we have two such powers.
Before I tell you what they are, let’s ponder the word “spiritual” for a minute. “Spiritual”: having to do with the spirit. If I possess a spiritual power, then it must be either a power over spirits, or a power that derives from my own spirit, that is, from my soul. An “inner spiritual power” certainly sounds more like that latter than the former, so let’s go with that. What kind of power can derive from my soul?
The ancients and the medievals didn’t think of the human mind as a single unified thing, as we do. They spoke of the mind as being divided into the Sense, the Imagination, the Appetite, the Intellect, the Will, and Memory. The Sense is simply our ability to sense things: not merely our Five Senses, but our emotions as well. The Imagination is our ability to recreate images, or “phantasms”, that is, to bring into mind from our Memory images of things we’ve previously sensed, and to create new images from them. The Appetite is that faculty we have of desiring those things we sense: that chocolate cake, for example. These faculties we share with the animals: your dog or cat can sense and remember and imagine and desire. The can opener turns on; the cat senses it, remembers, imagines food, desires it, and runs into the kitchen.
The Intellect and the Will, on the other hand, derive not from our bodies but our souls. Men and women have rational souls that exceed the “sensitive” souls of the beasts by being immortal, and by having Intellect and Will.
Intellect is our power of understanding, of conceptualizing. Contemplate, for a moment, the smallest house in Paris in the year before you were born, to use an example I ran into the other day. That’s an extremely clear concept; and no matter what year you were born you can easily see that in the previous year there were many houses in Paris and some one of them must have been the smallest. And yet, although you can conceive of this house, you can’t form an accurate picture of it. In so conceiving, you are using your Intellect rather than your Imagination.
The Will is our power of choosing from among the various goods present to our Imagination and Intellect. Unlike the beasts, we need not pursue that which is desirable to our senses. We can choose. We can recognize that the chocolate cake is good, and that it would be better in the long run to leave it alone.
So, two spiritual powers: the Intellect and the Will. And so what does it mean to be “spiritual”?
To know what is good, and to act accordingly.
The View from the Foothills 
Very interesting! 😀 “Spiritual” is certainly a word we take for granted.
I think your definition certainly fits the spirituality I have now as a Catholic. It is oriented toward a definite and absolute Good. But when I was “spiritual but not religious,” good was basically just a matter of personal opinion and whim.
While I now understand the intellect and will to be God-given faculties of the human soul, back then it really was about power–about being able to impose my will upon the world around me and exerting influence. I believed there were occult methods and techniques by which to unlock and unleash the intellect and will. They were like weapons to be obtained and wielded, rather than free gifts proper to human nature. Human nature in itself was not really anything special–humans were little more than animals.
Craziness. I’m so glad those days are behind me!
God be with you.
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I meant to write a comment on your other blog post asking about spiritual but not religious:
I am one whom considers herself spiritual and I can only give you the definition as it applies to me. And the Intellect and the Will is a good place to start. But I think how you are using them isn’t entirely correct WILL is not will-power (because that is the intellect rationalizing a desire, the Will is the part of you that instructs in desire and I don’t mean that as anything sinful, but if someone checked into themselves with no honesty and no judgment and asked, “what is it that I feel to do right now?” the answer might be, to go for a walk, take a nap, have a drink of water, pray, or even: “I want that piece of chocolate cake.” The Will when in tact and functioning properly does not instruct you towards destructive ends. Maybe your body really needs the high magnesium content in the chocolate and by not acquiescing, you are depriving your body of a nutrient it currently needs.
I often see “organized” religion as deconstructing the power and the safety of the WILL as it directs me. The Will is also that part of you that births “intention” not as “I intend to do that” but as a creationary principle: I will it to be so. As I see it, only God and I are responsible for the safety of my body and as Judaism teaches: we are co-creators with god. That is our purpose in life on earth at this time and I think religion teaches you that the body is evil and the person is innately sinful. The body can sin, when the Ego is what is driving the “bus” but the Ego is not the true nature of the person themselves. I don’t believe that God makes junk. The soul is perfect, but an intellect that identifies itself with the Ego will miss the mark again and again.
Now the intellect. There is a difference between intellect and the Mind. The intellect is what often becomes entangled with Ego or “the Devil” —
which in Hebrew means: the accuser like we see “him” at work in the Book of Job.
I guess I am kinda a rare case in that, I have studies religions my whole adult life, because in not having one I was infinitely fascinated with them. And because of my research I see very clearly that they are all after the same goal. I am not talking about those stupid internet phenoms like Zeitgeist either, I’m talking about actually scriptural comparisons. I guess the biggest thing about my idea about spirituality or religion is that a spiritually inclined person might understand, suspect, know that there is no One Way only. They might (like I have) had mystical experiences that at once proved religion and denied at the same time, denied their And they might see religion as being more limited than a possibility of taking benefit from all of them, or whichever calls to you personally.
What does it mean (to me) to be spiritual? I am a child of God, I was given an immortal immutable soul. I believe in karma and reincarnation like Origen of Alexandria.
I feel deeply that anything that creates fear in you, in relation to God is a man-made approach and not of the divine. Which is the number one thing that repels me from “religion” — and this is maybe because Evangelism is what we see in America and its very much attached to fear as a motivating tool: find Jesus so you won’t go to hell!
Overall, as a spiritual person, I do not “believe” that anything the spiritual Masters have done in their life on earth (Jesus, Buddha, etc) is beyond us. I find that religions were instituted as a means of passing down the “Way” to experiencing union with God, which I guess is “Gnostic” in a manner of speaking. The “I and the Father are One” experience, or in the Torah: “Here oh Israel, the Lord is One.”
We are living in Maya, which means illusion, like the Matrix, only I don’t think “the real world” is in rubble and I don’t think we’re hooked unto a machine to be harvested. But like you said: there is a world/s beyond the sensual universe.
This is getting very long… maybe we can continue the conversation if you find it interesting.
the LB
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I meant honesty and no judgment, oops.
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woah — a lot of typos, I’m so sorry. Did it in a hurry.
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Heather, reflecting on spiritual power is precisely what led me to write this series of posts: I asked the question, “What spiritual powers do we really have?”
Lindsay, thanks very much for your input: this is exactly the kind of response I was looking for. On the other hand, you’ve said far too much for me to respond here, in a comment box; I think I’ll need to take up some of your points individually, as separate posts. Best laid plans, of course, so please poke me if you don’t see anything happening.
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